David and Diogenes (Short Screenplay)
18 pages. Sci-Fi/Thriller. The Script.
A Brief Synopsis
In the distant future, the Earth has died and a corporation is attempting to revitalise it with the intention of using it as a kind of tourist trap. A classics professor takes a tour of the Athenian site and meets with an artificial rendering of one of his favourite philosophers, Diogenes, struggling to grapple with whether or not to do what he’s gone there to do…
The Background
This is a rather old script I wrote for a screenwriting class in second year, I’m not generally happy with how it turned out, but I hope I might be able to use it as some kind of marker to compare my writing to later on.
I ended up getting a first for the project, including the script and research folder, overall.
The script is set in a world in which the Earth has long since died, whilst humanity has been able to escape. A corporation is now attempting to reverse the damage we did to our old home, whilst providing for tourists to visit. A radical classics professor is on a mission to detonate a bomb within one such attraction and blow it up, but stops along the way to talk to an idol of his.
The script was intended to kind of approach the malleability of truth and its relation to time. David as a character is attempting to destroy the Ancestors Project because he sees is as revisionist, as a means by which a certain few individuals can dictate how the past has led to this point and paint over and whitewash the missteps and tragedies in humanity’s history - up to and including their literal removing of the dust of our civilisation. To add to this, I tried to implicate David himself as a victim of whitewashing his own past in that he wants to see himself as a pure, philosophical radical, but is actually being at least partially led by his own rage and impotence.
Diogenes as a character was interesting to me because it almost seems as though a character such as him could no longer exist. Whereas to engage in discourse - at least in as much as he was engaging in dialogues and confrontations - Diogenes didn’t have to compromise his ultimately cynical lifestyle, nowadays, to step into the public realm and be heard one must capitulate to the demands of the given society. It seems as though the world has gotten too big for any given individual to live a full life honestly and without pretence or artifice, whereas Diogenes’ world was small enough to do so.
To add to this, Diogenes also represents the sceptic to me. He’s a character that ultimately wants to deconstruct societal norms and goings on, where David is a man born out of a complex system of these norms. Diogenes throughout is attempting to deconstruct David and break him down so that he might relent, but all he’s doing is showing David what he already implicitly understands about himself at least on some level. There’s an element of Diogenes not being capable of fully levelling with David: as much as he criticises David for not understanding him or his philosophy, he doesn’t try to help him understand and he himself doesn’t try to understand why David can’t engage with him fully.
It seems that the bombing is a release for this rage of David’s. It’s his futile attempt to make the world smaller and to make things make sense by deconstructing them. Just as Diogenes defaced the currency long ago, David wants to deface the corporation.